29 Mar Berta Cáceres, In Her Own Words

Berta Cáceres, In Her Own Words is based on a 2012 interview I did with the Honduran environmental activist and co-founder of the Council of Indigenous People’s Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). I was in Central America as part of the Nobel Women’s Initiative and JASS (Just Associates) Mesoamerican delegation tasked with investigating worsening violence against women, especially human rights defenders.

Led by Nobel Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, we traveled to the region and heard more than two hundred testimonies from women, survivors and grassroots organizers, journalists and human rights advocates, as well as meeting with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales and other high-level officials.

The delegation documented numerous cases of femicides, disappearances, rapes, attacks on women human rights defenders, violations of women’s human rights and persecution in México, Honduras and Guatemala. Women testified that the attacks come from organized crime and from the government security forces charged with fighting crime and protecting citizens.

We selected certain women to be sure to film and Berta Cáceres was an outspoken critic of the post-coup Honduran government and their militarization of the countryside and of their targeted repression of activists like herself. There was an alarming rise in femicides while military spending increased. The United States supported this new government.

One of our most disturbing findings was that the governments, while formally recognizing the problem, were doing little in practice to abate the violence, particularly in cases that involve government forces. In some cases, governments were directly implicated in the violence.

The struggle for women’s and indigenous rights and the quest for justice were central to Berta Cáceres. This is what she lived for. This is what she died for.

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Pamela Yates

pamela@skylight.is

Pamela Yates is a co-founder of Skylight Pictures and currently the Creative Director of Skylight, a company dedicated to creating feature length documentary films and digital media tools that advance awareness of human rights and the quest for justice by implementing multi-year outreach campaigns designed to engage, educate and activate social change.